Local Resources

DigiStation at the Floyd County Library

As materials like VHS tapes, photographs, scrapbooks, slides, and negatives become older and more fragile, the race to digitize them and preserve personal memories becomes more important. The Floyd County Library takes the preservation of local and personal history seriously and has created the DigiStation as a space where community members can access tools to preserve their precious memories for future generations. 

The DigiStation is located in the Indiana Room at the Central Branch of the Floyd County Library. The station is by appointment only and usage of the station requires the completion of the DigiStation Guidelines and Participation Liability Waiver to use the station. Each appointment lasts 2 hours, please note that usage of the DigiStation requires at least basic and some advanced computer knowledge.

Schedule a DigiStation Appointment
DigiStation Guidelines and Participation Liability Waiver

DigiStation FAQs

Supported formats include:

  • Photographs, slides, and negatives
  • Documents 
  • Books (including scrapbooks, family histories, etc.)
  • VHS Tapes

Before your appointment you will need to:

Cloud storage software:

  • Dropbox (2GB of free storage space)
  • Google Drive (15GB of free storage space)
  • Archives.org (for non-copyrighted materials you are comfortable sharing publicly)

Physical Storage device:

  • External hard drives 

Not recommended for long-term storage but appropriate for transferring materials from DigiStation to home computer/hard drive: 

  • USB Drives – Available for purchase at the library
  • SSD Drives
  • DVDs and CDs

VHS Tapes:

Digitizing for VHS tapes takes place in real-time, for every 1 minute of video, it will take roughly 1.5 minutes to digitize. Within in 2-hour session, plan to only be able to accomplish digitizing around 1 and a half hours of tape.  

Photographs:

For photographs that are not fragile or extremely large, our feed scanner can digitize around 50 photos in around 5 minutes (including scanning and saving time). Times will differ depending on the quality of the scan (300 dpi vs. 600 dpi), learn more about scanning in our photo scanning guide.

Fragile and large photographs will take considerably longer because they will need to be scanned on the flatbed scanner. Roughly, 5 photographs will take around 15 minutes to scan. 

Books and Documents:

Scrapbooks, family histories, or other bound materials can be scanned using our overhead book scanner. Plan to only scan up to 100 pages in a session (including scanning and saving time). Smaller books, or single-page documents too fragile to put on the flatbed scanner, will take less time, roughly 5 documents will take 30 minutes to scan depending on how you will want to export the files. 

The following hardware is available at the Indiana Room DigiStation:

  • Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-speed Photo Scanning System
  • Epson Flatbed scanner
  • CZUR Aura Overhead Book Scanner
  • JVC VHS Player

The following software is available at the Indiana Room DigiStation:

  • FastFoto 
  • CZUR
  • EpsonScan
  • Elgato Video Capture